Parlez-Vous Francais?

I (along with seven other community members) was invited to the high school the other day as an honored guest and judge of Franco-Phonía, a festival where the kids celebrated “all” of the countries that speak French. Why does Baoba choose to celebrate France and its language?? I have absolutely no idea.

Various groups of students presented a country, telling about its culture and food, native dress, geography and politics. The countries represented were France, Luxembourg, Vietnam, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and Africa (apparently I’m the only judge who seemed to notice that Africa is not a country). And surprisingly, the one country that I naturally assumed would be represented – Haiti – was not even mentioned.

As a judge, it was my job to choose the country that was best represented in the various presentations. It was hard to choose a winner – mainly because every presentation blurred together. I learned that in France, Africa, Luxembourg, Italy, and Canada, the national food dishes are white rice, fish, and spaghetti (I think because these foods were easy for the kids to bring to class). As a judge I was supposed to try the foods, but by the time I got to the table to get my taste, all of the kids had already eaten everything. Although I did get to drink some wine with the high school students, since every country’s national beverage is a cheap red wine called “La Fuerza,” meaning “the strength” and on the bottle is a picture of a muscle builder flexing his biceps…mmm classy.

The native dress in all of the countries was jeans and sunglasses. Although the group from Switzerland added a jacket because of the cold weather. Most of the countries just did a basic model runway walk to show the clothes, but the group from Vietnam added three reggaeton dances so that the models could show how well the clothes fit when they booty-danced.

And the winner??? France. I actually liked Africa’s presentation best, but I just couldn’t announce them the winner since Africa is in fact a continent full of various countries, each with their own unique culture and geography. Apparently the kids are going to do the same thing in about a month or so, but they’re going to celebrate the countries that speak English, and I’m very much looking forward to those presentations.

Las Mariposas

Regina and I just led a three day camp for young Dominican girls ages 12-17. The camp, called Campamento Mariposas, is the start of a year-long all girls Peace Corps initiative. I have participated in various camps before (including the weeklong Camp GLOW (girls leading our world) last July), but this was the first one that I was actually in charge of coordinating and organizing. And let me tell you, planning large scale events in a third-world country without internet access and with little cell phone service is difficult!

We picked a gorgeous venue for the camp, a retreat center called Blue Moon, located in Sabaneta de Yásica. Instead of the normal dormitory setup, the girls slept in small cabañas. The space was very intimate (with room for only 20 girls and 10 volunteers), but on a mountaintop surrounded by lush greenery. It was away from the noise of the highway, and we thought it would be a great place for reflection. The only difficulty with the small space was that our eating area was also the only area to give charlas and do activities. So before and after every meal, Regina and I were busy pushing together tables and setting up chairs.

I was a little nervous about our agenda because I had heard about the success of the previous regional conference in the south. All of the volunteers raved about the amazing camp they gave based on gender roles, and even my boss suggested we copy their whole agenda. Since her idea came approximately four days before our conference was scheduled to start, we already had our agenda, which was based on self-esteem and self-confidence, organized.

Regina and I set up the three-day agenda based on the volunteers’ strengths. Jenie (a tai-kwan-do competitor) gave a self-defense demonstration. Iris (a youth volunteer in Sanchez) has an HIV-support group in her site, so she and a member of the support group gave a charla on HIV/AIDS. This charla was a huge success because the girls could relate to this woman’s real life experience living with the illness. Eva (a youth volunteer in Rincon Hondo and an amazing artist) led the girls in making plaster-of-paris masks of their faces so the girls could talk about the uniqueness of everyone’s faces. Our two male volunteers Andrew and Jacob gave a charla on gender roles, and I think it was more effective for the girls to hear males say that its ok for men to work in the kitchen and do chores than if just us female volunteers gave the same charla. And Regina (the dancer of the group) gave a great charla on nutrition and then led the girls in yoga and dance-exercise.

And of the course the girls loved all of the extra activities. There was plenty of time for the girls to relax and enjoy being away from the stresses of doing household chores and studying for classes and plenty of time for the girls to get to know each other. They loved swimming in the pool, and the last night we had a dance party and a bonfire (complete with s’mores). On Sunday morning, none of the girls wanted to leave and everyone was exchanging phone numbers and making plans to keep in touch.

With the success of Campamento Mariposas, I have decided to help lead the weeklong Camp GLOW this July. Alison and Mariel (two youth volunteers from the south) and I are planning everything, so Ill be sure to let you all know how that goes. Hopefully it all runs smoothly and we don’t have any flashfloods like last year!

Darlene

A group of American doctors (the Geheraty Medical Mission) recently came to Santo Domingo to perform free plastic surgeries on both kids and adults. The patients had problems ranging from cleft lips to extra digits to burn scars. These amazing doctors come every year to the Dominican Republic to stay two weeks helping those who are less fortunate.

Darlene is a 7-year-old girl in my site who has an extra finger and a extra toe. The extra finger doesn’t bother her. But the extra toe makes it difficult and painful for her to wear tennis shoes (which are required as part of the school uniform). When I heard about the medical mission, I thought that she would be a perfect candidate.

I found out about the medical mission when I was in the capital on Friday. Patient registration was the following Sunday. So I rushed back to Baoba to talk to Darlene’s mom. Darlene’s mom is a single mother who has two jobs: cleaning and cooking for a private home and working in a nail salon. When she heard about the opportunity, she told me that she would love for Darlene to have the surgery but unfortunately with the short notice, she couldn’t afford the trip or get off work. So I volunteered to take Darlene by myself.

We had to be at the hospital at 7 am on Sunday, so Darlene and I left Baoba on Saturday night. There was no way we could arrive on time if we left Sunday morning. This was only Darlene’s second trip to the capital, and she clung to me every second of the way. I traveled prepared for anything. I brought Dramamine, band-aids, Tylenol, mosquito repellent and anything else I could think of that she might need. Luckily she needed none of that. What she did enjoy however were my various forms of entertainment. I brought with us a deck of playing cards, a coloring book and crayons, the story Curious George and my ipod full of Dominican music. We got to the capital around 6 pm and went straight to dinner. I took her out for pizza because she had never eaten it before and she loved it! Afterwards, we just went back to the hostel and went to bed.

We woke up early on Sunday. I brushed and braided her hair, and we headed to the hospital. We arrived at 6:30, were given a ticket (number 68) and sent to stand in a line outside. I found the doctors, told them I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and they quickly changed my ticket to number 1 and moved us to a more comfortable waiting room. The doctors confirmed that they could perform the surgery on Darlene and scheduled us to return on Thursday.

We left Baoba early on Thursday morning (6:30 am) and arrived at the hospital around 11. For this trip, Darlene’s mom, Alexandra, also came with us. Once they put Darlene in the hospital gown, she became to cry because she was so nervous. So I went and put on hospital scrubs and told Darlene that I would go with her in the operating room and not leave her side until it was over. This seemed to calm her down.

We walked into the operating room and everything was going well. About two minutes after she received the anesthesia and fell asleep, I started feeling woozy (did you all see this coming?) so I tried to leave the operating room. But on my way out a nurse stopped me and asked me to open up a packet of gauze for her. This seemed to push me over the edge. My vision narrowed, I started sweating…and BOOM! I passed out on the operating room floor. So instead of taking care of Darlene, the doctors now had to worry about me. I woke up about 15 seconds later, lying on a hospital bed with a doctor holding my legs up in the air. Once everyone saw that I was ok and that I didn’t hit my head during the fall, the surgeons went back to the operating room. The Dominican nurses however stayed around me, offering me candy and Gatorade, and telling me that I was dumb for skipping breakfast that morning.

I stayed on my own little hospital bed until Darlene’s surgery was done and she was coming out of the anesthesia. Because I was at her side when she fell asleep and when she woke up, she thinks I stayed right there the whole time. She stayed in the recovery room for about 30 minutes, played with all of her gifts that the doctors gave her (a Barbie doll, 2 stuffed animals, stickers, coloring book, ball, jewelry), and then we returned to Baoba. Everyone keeps asking me how Darlene did in the surgery, and I can only reply “she did better than I.”

Only in the DR, Round Dos

My doña refuses to give me a glass of water to drink whenever I’m eating food that is served hot, like soup or rice pudding. When I asked her about it, she said it was because she knew someone who had gotten cancer and died from drinking something cold after eating something hot. In the same token, whenever I come back from running to the beach or doing some type of exercise, I am not allowed to open the refrigerator myself to get a glass of water. Because my body temperature is so hot, if I stand in front of something cold, like the fridge, I will die.

All Dominicans love the lottery. Every host family I’ve been in stops what they are doing every night at 9 p.m. to watch the lottery on television. Yet not one of those times has anyone ever bought a lottery ticket. They also repeatedly yell out the numbers in case anyone who happened to turn away from the tv for half a second missed the revealing of the numbers. The next day, everyone talks about the numbers that were selected.

I brought two photo albums with me to the DR: one full of pictures of my friends and me, and one with pictures of Jordan and me. These two photo albums sit on my counter for everyone to look at and marvel at how beautiful Americans are. I was feeling homesick the other day, so I went to look at the pictures. As I flipped through the photos, hundreds of tiny termites came running out of the album. Apparently they had nested in the felt background of the photo albums. So I sprayed the photo album and all of its plastic coverings with RAID in the hopes to kill the bugs (and not ruin the pictures!)

As I mentioned before in my journal entry on Baoba’s Patronales, a few of my girls were asked to dance at the town’s celebration. In the original dance, there were 5 girls, but for Patronales, only four of them were able to dance. Leidi’s mom wouldn’t let her dance because the sponsors at our little town’s festival were not going to pay the girls. So Leidi had to sit out on the sidelines simply because her mom was greedy and wanted some sort of compensation for her daughter to do what she loves.

Alvino had been bothering me for 2 months to start another English course so he could enlist. After all of pleading, I finally consented and signed people up for the course. The course lasted 4 months, and he only went to two classes. This made me so mad. I hadn’t wanted to teach another English class, and then the one person who convinced me to do it didn’t even attend the class regularly. After the course ended, I asked him why he never attended. His response: he was in love with me and being so close to me during the class made him nervous and gave him an upset stomach.

"Busca el colin"

When John Carlos (my 17-year-old handyman) came over to take care of my house’s termite problem, I got a little more than I had bargained for. I had been hounding this kid for 4 months to come over and kill all of the termites. I had the poison and the spray bottle, and all I needed was a muchacho to do the dirty work for me.

So I finally convinced him to come over by baking a chocolate cake and promising him two pieces as payment. He showed up, climbed up into my “attic” (which is really just like an open crawl space above my living room) and started spraying the insecticide. Just as he was about to finish, I heard him say “Whoa!”

“What is it??” I asked.

“Lauren, it’s nothing,” he replied. “Pero busca un colin rápido.” (translation: run and get a machete!)

I was a little confused as why he told me there was nothing, yet sent me to find a machete. But I quickly complied without asking more questions. As Frank once taught me, if everyone behind you starts to run, don’t stop to ask them why they are running; just run with them.

I gave him the machete, and went outside. Whatever was going on up in that attic, I did not want to be near it. After about two solid minutes of hearing the metal repeatedly clink against the wooden beams, I heard a soft thud. In my living room floor was a 3 foot long black snake (now a beheaded and bloody mess).

John Carlos threw the snake outside in the community trash pile, threw some bleach on my bloodstained floor, washed his hands and asked for his cake, while I stood there in shock, creeped out by the fact that a snake had been living in my house for who-knows-how-long.

When I went to return the machete back to my neighbor, I explained about the snake and she asked me what we did with it. I told her that we had thrown it in the trash pile and she informed me that (the superstition is) we have to burn the snake as a warning to all other snakes in the area. Otherwise more will come. So then she and spent the next hour going through the trash to find and burn the snake. We never found it, so I’m just hoping that the other snakes will see their buddy beheaded and get the message even without setting it afire.

America is AMAZING!!

Tomorrow I head back to the beauty and warmth of the Dominican Republic. While I am definitely not ready to leave the luxuries of America quite yet, I am ready to leave this cold weather. Right now (at 9 p.m.) it is 73 degrees in Santo Domingo.

I just want to thank everyone who made the time to visit with me and hear about my travels; everyone who bought me a drink or dinner (or a bowl game ticket!); everyone who cooked and baked me delicious food; and everyone who gave me books or art supplies to take back to Baoba. I truly would not be able to do this job without the love and support of all of you.

I am blessed to have such amazing family and friends and to live in a country where running water, showers and electricity are the norm. Can't wait to see you all again in November 2010, and don't forget that I am always welcoming visitors.

La Quinceañera

I went to a quinceañera on Saturday night. Quinceañeras is like the Spanish equivalent of a Sweet Sixteen birthday party, except for 15 year olds. Boys don’t really have them, and the girls use them as an excuse to dress up and dance with all of their friends. This was my first one in Baoba (birthday parties are extremely rare because the families here don’t have enough money to spend it frivolously on a party), so I was excited to attend.

Yaritza, the birthday girl, told us the party was to start at 4 in the afternoon. This was a little depressing because I teach my English class at 5 so I gave her my regrets and told her that I couldn’t make it. Yamel and Elizabeth (two girls, who were also invited to the party, yet were in my English class) and I stopped by Yaritza’s house at 4:15 on the way to the English class. Yaritza, decked out in a full-length gown, was getting her hair and makeup done by a friend and the rest of the family was busy putting up pink and white balloons all over the house. We wished Yaritza good luck and then went to class.

After the English class, at 6:30 pm, we passed by Yaritza’s house. The party still hadn’t started! So we decided to stick around and wait to celebrate the quinceañera. It was dark outside, and there was no electricity this night, but the Yaritza’s family had borrowed a generator. About 15 kids had gathered at the house, all eager to dance and eat cake, but the generator wouldn’t start. So everyone just sat there complaining about the fact that there was no music for at least 30 minutes. Then I kicked into volunteer/party host and announced that we should play a game while we waited for either the generator to work or the lights to come back on.

I had no idea what game we could all play, but luckily they had already planned one. The game was kind of like a sexier version of high school superlatives. There were two bags (one for the boys and one for the girls) full of various characteristics like “prettiest smile” or “smartest.” A boy and a girl had to each pull out a characteristic from the bag and then kiss (preferably on the cheek since I was playing as well) a member of the opposite sex that fit that particular description. I won for “best hair” (I was the only blonde), “best eyes” (they were the only blue ones), “person who likes to be alone the most” and “person who dresses the most old-fashioned.” I also voluntarily won for “ugliest” because I simply couldn’t believe that someone was going to get called out for that, so I quickly told the boys to choose me for that one.

After the game, which lasted about an hour, they lights still hadn’t come back on. So we all gathered around the candles to eat a snack of two saltine crackers, a glass of soda and a lollipop per person (that’s a little different than the food at our American birthday parties, right??) There was also a cake, but the custom generally is to cut the cake the next day and pass it out to everyone who came to the party. I happened to get gypped and Yaritza never brought me cake, which to be honest, made me a little upset.

By this time, the boys had figured out how to make the generator work, so we cranked up the reggaeton music and everyone danced until about 9:30 p.m., and then everyone left.